Jose Guadalupe Posada: Prophet of the Mexican
Revolution
Revolution
The artist foretold, in pictures, the ten years' travail he did not witness; and the translation thereafter, in
pure artist's values; the travail which bore the new Mexican image in painting, music, literature.
pure artist's values; the travail which bore the new Mexican image in painting, music, literature.
By Annita Brenner
Guadalupe Posada the illustrator of ballads was the prophet of two revolutions, both of them violent.
One was the armed mass uprising generally dated 1910-1921, from the fall of Diaz to the presidency of
Obregon. When a Mexican speaks of "the revolution" he refers to this period, but more often, unless he
is speaking of a particular event, to the ideology developed during and after this warring. Concretely, the
revolution as yet has made no great changes in the social organization and the private welfares of most
Mexican citizenry—largely still the contrary. It has, however, changed the public mind.
Revolution in Mexico now means loyalty to native values; means an attitude of facing mucky political and
social messes and cleaning them radically; means mental honesty; and the highest respect for work. The
cornerstone and yardstick of national value is the native: the peasant, the laborer. Your true
revolutionary is likely to clasp more fervently than necessary, the heretofore "degenerate and ridiculous"
peasant to his heart; and to kick spectacularly, foreign art, foreign systems, foreign images, into the Gulf
or the muddy Rio Grande. "Imposition" —in the Mexican sense absentee landlordship of everything
including land—is the factual and ideological heart of the heaped resentments which brought on
revolution. The new social religion is a burning anxiety in Mexico to be true to herself.
The artistic expression of this national feeling ocurred before, after, and simultaneously with, the armed
expression. Guadalupe Posada foretold, in pictures, the ten years' travail he did not witness; and the
translation thereafter, in pure artist's values; the travail which bore the new Mexican image in painting,
music, literature. Which bears a new philosophy, a new aesthetic, a living and great national art.
Guadalupe Posada was born in Leon, Guanajuato, in 1864, like most of the great men of Mexico from a
middle-class, provincial family. Leon is a simple old town center of roads from great mines; Guanajuato is
a sage-green and gray-brown state tufted and terraced and tunneled, of surface usually sparse. The
landscape and the life of the people is biblical.
A flood famous in ballads in the year 1888 set young Posada to thinking about other places than Leon,
and he went to the capital to seek his fortune, he said. Don Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, founder of the best
known publishing house in Mexico, employed him as illustrator. The house of Vanegas Arroyo was not a
business organization. It was a family. The children played with old cliches and learned to rhyme when
they learned to read, and inherited the enterprise. Though revolutionary looters crashed most of the
presses, and though vindictive bureaucrats later, accusing the house of pro-Church sentiments,
committed therein vandalism, the children and grandchildren of the house of Vanegas Arroyo still edit its
street-gazettes and print its hymns, plays, ballads and tales, tending its presses as if they were
ancestral fields.
The eldest son of Don Antonio went mad when the presses were broken by government explosives. Don
Blas, a middle son, is now the manager and editorial policy of the house. His mother, the wife of the
founder, tends the expendio, the retail shop. She sits crocheting among stacks of leaflets and leather-
bound prayer books, and gossips of current and past events with the fruitmen, the flowerwomen, and
the occasionally slightly drunk troubadours who drop in to tell or hear the usual latest, sometimes in
verse. These latest are still illustrated by Posada, though he died nearly ten years ago (in 1913). The
cuts are sturdy enough for many reprintings, and as current events and personages resemble past,
appropriate in subject.
Don Blas remembers Posada as an amiable man, already bald, with a fringe of white hair around his
smooth dark skull. "He was very industrious. He began to work at eight o'clock in the morning and
worked until seven at night. My father would enter the shop (we set up a shop for him after he had
worked a while with us) with whatever he wanted to print, and say, 'Señor Posada, let's illustrate this',
and Posada would read it and while he was reading would pick up his pen and say, 'What do you think
about this little paragraph', and he would dip his pen into the special ink he used and then give the plate
an acid bath and it was finished. He got three pesos a day whatever he did, and in that time it was a lot
because whoever had as much as seventy-five pesos a month was at least a general. Posada was very
good-humored and peace-loving. He hated quarrels, and treated everybody well. He was no snob.
"One thing about him only, I suppose, could be considered a little out of the ordinary and this was that
he liked to drink, but in a very special way. He saved all year, fifty cents a day, putting it in a little box. On
the twentieth of December he broke the bank and sent the money to Leon, to his family, and they
bought for him with it big barrels of tequila, high as your waist. Then on New Year's Eve he began to
drink, alone, and drank and drank till he finished all the barrels, which took from a month to a month and
a half. For a fortnight after he couldn't work, because his hands shook. He was slender as a young man
but from drinking like that he grew very large in the stomach… And eight or a hundred litres of tequila a
year finally killed him."
II
In the house of Vanegas Arroyo the Spanish romance emerges as a Mexican corrido, and the woodcuts
and prints which accompany it change from medieval, comparable to Spanish, French, German and British
popular engraving, to modern Mexican. Manuel Manilla, Posada's predecessor, was an excellent
craftsman who followed the colonial style developed directly from Spanish engravings. Manilla is romantic,
has the simplicity of total acceptance, as well of text as of traditional attitude to the text, spiritual and
artistic.
Posada created his own tradition, beginning with the mechanics of his art. He invented a technique of
drawing in acid directly on zinc plates, departing thus from the older wood or zinc cut. His engravings are
not examples of mass art. They establish him as a personal, highly competent, completely conscious and
fully adequate master. There is the same distance attitude which determined his position, his occupation,
the choice of his subjects and the manner of portrayal; which links him with the revolution by mob, and
the revolution on painted walls. Posada worked in the period just before the revolution; in the air of
Mexico's age of gilt. Official Mexico was affectedly French, foreign. It had a strong hangover of bibelot
from the time of Maximilian, a taste for landscape from rationalist France, and an idea four centuries old
that mentally and spiritually, the "decent" people, the upper minority, must belong to Europe. Mexico was
loot. To Europe must be looked for culture.
This gilded age marks the ultimate divergence between native and white, between the culture of the
people, in the medieval sense of that class, and the culture of the elite. The official artists of the period,
who have sunk to the anonymity Posada espoused, were fin de siecle. Their patrons were formal bearded
portly old gentlemen and large-volumed ladies bound in black (as if mourning in advance the bitter days
to come) who lived among spindle-legged chairs, mirrors, and lace to grotesquerie. And who lived idly in
euphemy.
To have taken much notice of ballads or their illustrations would in the gilded age have been considered
a suspicious and at all events a ridiculous proceeding. These belonged in the servants' quarters. Posada
chose, therefore, instead of immediate applause, to be unknown, widely distributed, and much enjoyed;
to be also useful. Perhaps in conversations with Don Antonio Vanegas Arroyo; perhaps only in his own
mind, Posada drew significant and thoughtful commentary on the events of the time: protested,
foreboded, and with a full heart scribbled on a corner of the national slate a mene, mene, tekel upharsin.
He turns an obsidian mirror upon the land and makes a choice, deliberate image.
Manilla's illustrations for prayers, or for ballads such as that of the unfortunate Juan who for stealing the
jewel of a saint was snatched to hell, show the artist's explicit and calm belief in the form and manner of
the saint, in the form and nature of the demon, in the procedure of snatching. Posada's fiends are
extremely fiendish, caricatures, mockery. Manilla's women are peasant women, arcadian, idyllic; Posada's
are portraits, women of tragedy. Portrait of the national panorama carries conviction enough, when it is
conscious portrait, and establishes the inevitable social outcome. A peasant family on the march, to exile
and in slavery; a patient crowd, restless a little in time of hunger, women holding their empty baskets;
the plague, and people shoveled dead into carts, mounded. He garbs the dictator and his cabinet in the
skull and skeleton of national carnival. He makes Federal policemen and soldiers effeminate. Blandly he
pictures an aristocrat's ball (an event of the time), as a dance of perverts.
Chronologically last Posada chooses from Vanegas Arroyo's "Street Gazette" (leaflets recording usually
miracles and remarkable crimes) strikes, mobs, anti-Diaz meetings, dispersed by the buckled and
sworded police. Madero enters the capital and Posada makes him bow and smile like a puppet. In the
earthquake which heralds his entrance at dawn on the day of the parade, Posada symmetrically crashes
the Mexican world into shards. When the metropolitan press later describes Zapata as a bloody,
pernicious and monstrous "Attila of the South" (about fifty miles south) and pictures Villa, echoing
American reporters as a kind of genial Robin Hood, Posada makes Villa plumply ambitious; of Zapata he
builds somber grandeur.
By implication not evident in the text he was illustrating; by interpretation grown of conviction; because
of his shafted laughter; because of enormous pity and tranquil clairvoyance, Posada is the prophet of
that sudden shift in the national scene which comes with the revolution. There is a different reliance on
miracles. Hope walks out of its mystic garments and girdles itself with bullets.
Guadalupe Posada the illustrator of ballads was smilingly aware of the genteel National Academy of Arts
around the corner from his hole-in-the-wall workshop. Possibly he used its excellent library. Doubtless he
occasionally nodded to a couple of restive youngsters who, on their way back from the pedagogues,
elbowed each other in front of his window (as after on mural scaffolds), and cut off some of his light.
Orozco and Rivera both were impressed by one thing in that window besides the artist himself. This was
a very fine print of Michael Angelo's Last Judgment.
One was the armed mass uprising generally dated 1910-1921, from the fall of Diaz to the presidency of
Obregon. When a Mexican speaks of "the revolution" he refers to this period, but more often, unless he
is speaking of a particular event, to the ideology developed during and after this warring. Concretely, the
revolution as yet has made no great changes in the social organization and the private welfares of most
Mexican citizenry—largely still the contrary. It has, however, changed the public mind.
Revolution in Mexico now means loyalty to native values; means an attitude of facing mucky political and
social messes and cleaning them radically; means mental honesty; and the highest respect for work. The
cornerstone and yardstick of national value is the native: the peasant, the laborer. Your true
revolutionary is likely to clasp more fervently than necessary, the heretofore "degenerate and ridiculous"
peasant to his heart; and to kick spectacularly, foreign art, foreign systems, foreign images, into the Gulf
or the muddy Rio Grande. "Imposition" —in the Mexican sense absentee landlordship of everything
including land—is the factual and ideological heart of the heaped resentments which brought on
revolution. The new social religion is a burning anxiety in Mexico to be true to herself.
The artistic expression of this national feeling ocurred before, after, and simultaneously with, the armed
expression. Guadalupe Posada foretold, in pictures, the ten years' travail he did not witness; and the
translation thereafter, in pure artist's values; the travail which bore the new Mexican image in painting,
music, literature. Which bears a new philosophy, a new aesthetic, a living and great national art.
Guadalupe Posada was born in Leon, Guanajuato, in 1864, like most of the great men of Mexico from a
middle-class, provincial family. Leon is a simple old town center of roads from great mines; Guanajuato is
a sage-green and gray-brown state tufted and terraced and tunneled, of surface usually sparse. The
landscape and the life of the people is biblical.
A flood famous in ballads in the year 1888 set young Posada to thinking about other places than Leon,
and he went to the capital to seek his fortune, he said. Don Antonio Vanegas Arroyo, founder of the best
known publishing house in Mexico, employed him as illustrator. The house of Vanegas Arroyo was not a
business organization. It was a family. The children played with old cliches and learned to rhyme when
they learned to read, and inherited the enterprise. Though revolutionary looters crashed most of the
presses, and though vindictive bureaucrats later, accusing the house of pro-Church sentiments,
committed therein vandalism, the children and grandchildren of the house of Vanegas Arroyo still edit its
street-gazettes and print its hymns, plays, ballads and tales, tending its presses as if they were
ancestral fields.
The eldest son of Don Antonio went mad when the presses were broken by government explosives. Don
Blas, a middle son, is now the manager and editorial policy of the house. His mother, the wife of the
founder, tends the expendio, the retail shop. She sits crocheting among stacks of leaflets and leather-
bound prayer books, and gossips of current and past events with the fruitmen, the flowerwomen, and
the occasionally slightly drunk troubadours who drop in to tell or hear the usual latest, sometimes in
verse. These latest are still illustrated by Posada, though he died nearly ten years ago (in 1913). The
cuts are sturdy enough for many reprintings, and as current events and personages resemble past,
appropriate in subject.
Don Blas remembers Posada as an amiable man, already bald, with a fringe of white hair around his
smooth dark skull. "He was very industrious. He began to work at eight o'clock in the morning and
worked until seven at night. My father would enter the shop (we set up a shop for him after he had
worked a while with us) with whatever he wanted to print, and say, 'Señor Posada, let's illustrate this',
and Posada would read it and while he was reading would pick up his pen and say, 'What do you think
about this little paragraph', and he would dip his pen into the special ink he used and then give the plate
an acid bath and it was finished. He got three pesos a day whatever he did, and in that time it was a lot
because whoever had as much as seventy-five pesos a month was at least a general. Posada was very
good-humored and peace-loving. He hated quarrels, and treated everybody well. He was no snob.
"One thing about him only, I suppose, could be considered a little out of the ordinary and this was that
he liked to drink, but in a very special way. He saved all year, fifty cents a day, putting it in a little box. On
the twentieth of December he broke the bank and sent the money to Leon, to his family, and they
bought for him with it big barrels of tequila, high as your waist. Then on New Year's Eve he began to
drink, alone, and drank and drank till he finished all the barrels, which took from a month to a month and
a half. For a fortnight after he couldn't work, because his hands shook. He was slender as a young man
but from drinking like that he grew very large in the stomach… And eight or a hundred litres of tequila a
year finally killed him."
II
In the house of Vanegas Arroyo the Spanish romance emerges as a Mexican corrido, and the woodcuts
and prints which accompany it change from medieval, comparable to Spanish, French, German and British
popular engraving, to modern Mexican. Manuel Manilla, Posada's predecessor, was an excellent
craftsman who followed the colonial style developed directly from Spanish engravings. Manilla is romantic,
has the simplicity of total acceptance, as well of text as of traditional attitude to the text, spiritual and
artistic.
Posada created his own tradition, beginning with the mechanics of his art. He invented a technique of
drawing in acid directly on zinc plates, departing thus from the older wood or zinc cut. His engravings are
not examples of mass art. They establish him as a personal, highly competent, completely conscious and
fully adequate master. There is the same distance attitude which determined his position, his occupation,
the choice of his subjects and the manner of portrayal; which links him with the revolution by mob, and
the revolution on painted walls. Posada worked in the period just before the revolution; in the air of
Mexico's age of gilt. Official Mexico was affectedly French, foreign. It had a strong hangover of bibelot
from the time of Maximilian, a taste for landscape from rationalist France, and an idea four centuries old
that mentally and spiritually, the "decent" people, the upper minority, must belong to Europe. Mexico was
loot. To Europe must be looked for culture.
This gilded age marks the ultimate divergence between native and white, between the culture of the
people, in the medieval sense of that class, and the culture of the elite. The official artists of the period,
who have sunk to the anonymity Posada espoused, were fin de siecle. Their patrons were formal bearded
portly old gentlemen and large-volumed ladies bound in black (as if mourning in advance the bitter days
to come) who lived among spindle-legged chairs, mirrors, and lace to grotesquerie. And who lived idly in
euphemy.
To have taken much notice of ballads or their illustrations would in the gilded age have been considered
a suspicious and at all events a ridiculous proceeding. These belonged in the servants' quarters. Posada
chose, therefore, instead of immediate applause, to be unknown, widely distributed, and much enjoyed;
to be also useful. Perhaps in conversations with Don Antonio Vanegas Arroyo; perhaps only in his own
mind, Posada drew significant and thoughtful commentary on the events of the time: protested,
foreboded, and with a full heart scribbled on a corner of the national slate a mene, mene, tekel upharsin.
He turns an obsidian mirror upon the land and makes a choice, deliberate image.
Manilla's illustrations for prayers, or for ballads such as that of the unfortunate Juan who for stealing the
jewel of a saint was snatched to hell, show the artist's explicit and calm belief in the form and manner of
the saint, in the form and nature of the demon, in the procedure of snatching. Posada's fiends are
extremely fiendish, caricatures, mockery. Manilla's women are peasant women, arcadian, idyllic; Posada's
are portraits, women of tragedy. Portrait of the national panorama carries conviction enough, when it is
conscious portrait, and establishes the inevitable social outcome. A peasant family on the march, to exile
and in slavery; a patient crowd, restless a little in time of hunger, women holding their empty baskets;
the plague, and people shoveled dead into carts, mounded. He garbs the dictator and his cabinet in the
skull and skeleton of national carnival. He makes Federal policemen and soldiers effeminate. Blandly he
pictures an aristocrat's ball (an event of the time), as a dance of perverts.
Chronologically last Posada chooses from Vanegas Arroyo's "Street Gazette" (leaflets recording usually
miracles and remarkable crimes) strikes, mobs, anti-Diaz meetings, dispersed by the buckled and
sworded police. Madero enters the capital and Posada makes him bow and smile like a puppet. In the
earthquake which heralds his entrance at dawn on the day of the parade, Posada symmetrically crashes
the Mexican world into shards. When the metropolitan press later describes Zapata as a bloody,
pernicious and monstrous "Attila of the South" (about fifty miles south) and pictures Villa, echoing
American reporters as a kind of genial Robin Hood, Posada makes Villa plumply ambitious; of Zapata he
builds somber grandeur.
By implication not evident in the text he was illustrating; by interpretation grown of conviction; because
of his shafted laughter; because of enormous pity and tranquil clairvoyance, Posada is the prophet of
that sudden shift in the national scene which comes with the revolution. There is a different reliance on
miracles. Hope walks out of its mystic garments and girdles itself with bullets.
Guadalupe Posada the illustrator of ballads was smilingly aware of the genteel National Academy of Arts
around the corner from his hole-in-the-wall workshop. Possibly he used its excellent library. Doubtless he
occasionally nodded to a couple of restive youngsters who, on their way back from the pedagogues,
elbowed each other in front of his window (as after on mural scaffolds), and cut off some of his light.
Orozco and Rivera both were impressed by one thing in that window besides the artist himself. This was
a very fine print of Michael Angelo's Last Judgment.
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III
The first revolutionary songs that Posada illustrated
were ballads of love and exile, and prophetic lyrics
like this:
Suppose we were chaff, that was lying about
When a very small whirlwind brushed us to the sky,
And then at the moment when we sailed highest,
A wind that was stronger blew us apart…
Of ballads, Posada illustrated two classics, the
prisoner and the soldier. These lovely things ache
still in every singing voice of the land. They are very
old. They span revolutionary history, and make it.
The prisoner is "The Prisoner of San Juan de Ulua",
a fortress built down into the waters of the Gulf of
Mexico just off the coast of Veracruz. Here Diaz
The first revolutionary songs that Posada illustrated
were ballads of love and exile, and prophetic lyrics
like this:
Suppose we were chaff, that was lying about
When a very small whirlwind brushed us to the sky,
And then at the moment when we sailed highest,
A wind that was stronger blew us apart…
Of ballads, Posada illustrated two classics, the
prisoner and the soldier. These lovely things ache
still in every singing voice of the land. They are very
old. They span revolutionary history, and make it.
The prisoner is "The Prisoner of San Juan de Ulua",
a fortress built down into the waters of the Gulf of
Mexico just off the coast of Veracruz. Here Diaz
| ADVERTISEMENT |
buried conscientious objectors. In a ballad-picture, one of them jumps off the parapet into the bellies of
sharks below. The chant says in part:
I am imprisoned behind the bars
A prisoner I must remain;
I cannot weep, and from my heart
I sing my sadness and my pain.
In the morning I was taken
They sat me on a bench;
By the judge's verdict, deliberate
Guilty to prison I was sentenced.
It is no longer the boat or sail
That waits for me on the open waves,
In San Juan de Ulua, the terrible jail,
I'll end my sorrows and my days.
The ballad of the soldier is the story of a Federal, one of the Diaz army. Any one.
At the age of fifteen,
Pressed into service
I was made a soldier
Of the fifteenth of Puebla.
I followed the profession
Happy and content
When some time had passed
They made me a sergeant.
Then I did not like
Fighting any more,
So I deserted
And went back home.
I was in my house,
With my poor mother,
When the patrol
Came sword in hand for me.
Señores, señores,
How do I harm you?
You rascal, you scoundrel
Deserted from the army.
Now they are taking him
To the colonel for trial
And his poor mother
Follows him crying.
Now they are dragging him
There by the hands,
And they burst fountains
Oh, blood of his veins!
Goodbye my old quarters
With its many doors,
Goodbye my lieutenant
And my corporal Dolores.
Be careful, be careful
Soldiers and drummers
He goes out tomorrow
To be shot with the others.
Goodbye little brothers,
Dear parents, farewell
Here my sins end,
I have no more to tell.
When the revolution was an act; when Madero, refused sanctuary in the American Embassy, had been
shot by people who next Easter appeared in effigy on telephone posts; and Villa filled the foreign press
and his leather breeches with the figure of the Mexican Bad Man, Posada died. He had caught up the
past and etched it to the future in hundreds of dramatic little pictures permanent till dust and the ink of
many reprintings erase them. He had sketched in two inches monumental figures, national epics, that
later grew to ten and fifteen feet high on frescoed walls. His women are the rearguard of gunned
pilgrims thereafter; and the madonnas, the sweethearts, whose wooings became marching songs. Thus
Adelita, the Villa musical herald, sung always with spatter of bullets and whoops at the end of each
stanza:
Adelita is the name of a maiden
Whom I love though we be so far apart,
She's a rose growing somewhere in a garden,
That some day I will pin on my heart.
If Adelita went off with another,
Ceaseless her road I would gain,
If by sea in a warship I'd follow,
If by land in a military train.
Adelita is a girl of the border,
Green as the sea are her eyes,
The soldiers all dream about her,
Every one of them for Adelita cries.
Oh, the bugle that calls us to battle,
And the bugle that calls us to review
In my soul echoes always your name only,
Adelita my heart longs for you.
If some day I am killed in a battle,
If my body on the sierra is to lie,
Adelita, if God will allow it,
To the sierra you shall go and cry.
And thus Valentina, the Zapata shriek, sung by Indians disappeared under great sombreros or in the
cracks of the hills, on horseback:
Valentina, Valentina,
Valentina I must say,
I am driven by a passion,
That is what brings me today.
Because of this love, they have told me
I'll suffer and pay, and pay
Who cares, if it was the devil
I'll be killed in my own way.
If now I'm drinking tequila,
Tomorrow I guzzle fine wine,
Because today I'm a poor man,
Tomorrow I shall be gone.
Valentina, Valentina,
Listen to what I shall say,
If I'm to be dead tomorrow
Let them kill me right away...!
sharks below. The chant says in part:
I am imprisoned behind the bars
A prisoner I must remain;
I cannot weep, and from my heart
I sing my sadness and my pain.
In the morning I was taken
They sat me on a bench;
By the judge's verdict, deliberate
Guilty to prison I was sentenced.
It is no longer the boat or sail
That waits for me on the open waves,
In San Juan de Ulua, the terrible jail,
I'll end my sorrows and my days.
The ballad of the soldier is the story of a Federal, one of the Diaz army. Any one.
At the age of fifteen,
Pressed into service
I was made a soldier
Of the fifteenth of Puebla.
I followed the profession
Happy and content
When some time had passed
They made me a sergeant.
Then I did not like
Fighting any more,
So I deserted
And went back home.
I was in my house,
With my poor mother,
When the patrol
Came sword in hand for me.
Señores, señores,
How do I harm you?
You rascal, you scoundrel
Deserted from the army.
Now they are taking him
To the colonel for trial
And his poor mother
Follows him crying.
Now they are dragging him
There by the hands,
And they burst fountains
Oh, blood of his veins!
Goodbye my old quarters
With its many doors,
Goodbye my lieutenant
And my corporal Dolores.
Be careful, be careful
Soldiers and drummers
He goes out tomorrow
To be shot with the others.
Goodbye little brothers,
Dear parents, farewell
Here my sins end,
I have no more to tell.
When the revolution was an act; when Madero, refused sanctuary in the American Embassy, had been
shot by people who next Easter appeared in effigy on telephone posts; and Villa filled the foreign press
and his leather breeches with the figure of the Mexican Bad Man, Posada died. He had caught up the
past and etched it to the future in hundreds of dramatic little pictures permanent till dust and the ink of
many reprintings erase them. He had sketched in two inches monumental figures, national epics, that
later grew to ten and fifteen feet high on frescoed walls. His women are the rearguard of gunned
pilgrims thereafter; and the madonnas, the sweethearts, whose wooings became marching songs. Thus
Adelita, the Villa musical herald, sung always with spatter of bullets and whoops at the end of each
stanza:
Adelita is the name of a maiden
Whom I love though we be so far apart,
She's a rose growing somewhere in a garden,
That some day I will pin on my heart.
If Adelita went off with another,
Ceaseless her road I would gain,
If by sea in a warship I'd follow,
If by land in a military train.
Adelita is a girl of the border,
Green as the sea are her eyes,
The soldiers all dream about her,
Every one of them for Adelita cries.
Oh, the bugle that calls us to battle,
And the bugle that calls us to review
In my soul echoes always your name only,
Adelita my heart longs for you.
If some day I am killed in a battle,
If my body on the sierra is to lie,
Adelita, if God will allow it,
To the sierra you shall go and cry.
And thus Valentina, the Zapata shriek, sung by Indians disappeared under great sombreros or in the
cracks of the hills, on horseback:
Valentina, Valentina,
Valentina I must say,
I am driven by a passion,
That is what brings me today.
Because of this love, they have told me
I'll suffer and pay, and pay
Who cares, if it was the devil
I'll be killed in my own way.
If now I'm drinking tequila,
Tomorrow I guzzle fine wine,
Because today I'm a poor man,
Tomorrow I shall be gone.
Valentina, Valentina,
Listen to what I shall say,
If I'm to be dead tomorrow
Let them kill me right away...!
Published by the Hispanic Institute of Social Issues in Phoenix, Arizona
|
| HISTORY IS ABOUT TO CHANGE Grassroots Journalism |
REPRESSION Anti-Diaz meetings,
dispersed by the buckled and
sworded police, depicted by the
Mexican artist.
dispersed by the buckled and
sworded police, depicted by the
Mexican artist.
PARADE President Francisco I.
Madero enters the Mexican capital
in 1910, and Posada makes him
bow and smile like a puppet.
Madero enters the Mexican capital
in 1910, and Posada makes him
bow and smile like a puppet.
MASTER Posada created his own
tradition, beginning with the
mechanics of his art. He invented a
technique of drawing in acid directly
on zinc plates. He drew significant
and thoughtful commentary on the
events of the time.
tradition, beginning with the
mechanics of his art. He invented a
technique of drawing in acid directly
on zinc plates. He drew significant
and thoughtful commentary on the
events of the time.
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